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Forgent JPEG Patent Thrown Out by the Patent Office

Friday, May 26th, 2006

A while back I wrote about the Forgent JPEG patent and how they are sending demand letters to small companies (I posted a copy here). Now comes word from GrokLaw that most of the patent has been thrown out by the Patent Office as invalid. No word on whether any of ...

InfoCard: Sender-ID All over again?

Friday, March 10th, 2006

Wired ran an article today by Lawrence Lessing singing the praises of a new Microsoft protocol called "InfoCard". I took a quick look at the technical reference and it seems very straight forward AND is all build on a bunch of OASIS and W3C standards for web services. So far, ...

The Forgent Demand Letters for JPEG Royalties

Tuesday, May 31st, 2005

(This post was part of a separate "Standards Blog" which has been merged into my main blog) About a month ago I wrote about the Forgent JPEG Patent saga. Recently a faithful reader sent me a copy of a demand letter sent on behalf of Forgent (to a company that shall ...

The Never Ending JPEG Patent Saga

Wednesday, April 27th, 2005

(This post was part of a separate "Standards Blog" which has been merged into my main blog) Last April a company called Forgent Networks initiated 31 lawsuits against various companies using the JPEG format based on an old US Patent # 4,698,672 which Forgent acquired by buying up some other company. ...

Patenting Autofill

Thursday, January 13th, 2005

Do you like the Opera form autofill feature? What about FireFox's or Google Toolbar's? IANAL, but it might be patented ... by Microsoft, Apple and Intel. Take a look at the following three patents: 6,651,217 - "System and method for populating forms with previously used data values" 6,192,380 -"Automatic web based form ...

2004: The Year That Promised Email Authentication

Saturday, December 25th, 2004

(This article was published at Circle-ID) As the year comes to a close, it is important to reflect on what has been one of the major actions in the anti-spam arena this year: the quest for email authentication. With email often called the "killer app" of the Internet, it is important ...

Sender-ID/FOSS Rift to be Resolved?

Thursday, November 11th, 2004

Daniel Quinlan of ASF mentioned in a recent newsgroup posting that Sender-ID negotiations between the FOSS world and Microsoft may restart: I also briefly met with Ryan Hamlin, the GM of Microsoft's Safety Technology & Strategy group, and he's interested in attempting a second try at the patent license negotiation between us (well, ...

Patenting the Internet in Your Spare Time

Saturday, November 6th, 2004

According to a post to the IETF's IPR list and an eWeek story, Microsoft maybe asserting IP rights over basic Internet protocols: Has Microsoft been trying to retroactively claim IP (intellectual property) rights over many of the Internet's basic protocols? Larry J. Blunk, senior engineer for networking research and development at ...

Sender-ID Back from the Dead

Monday, October 25th, 2004

(This entry has been Slashdotted and published on Circle-ID). With the closure of IETF's MARID group a month ago, many of us have left Microsoft's Sender-ID standard for the dead. After being rejected by the Apache Foundation and the Debian Project over licensing issues, and causing the closure of MARID for ...

More Patent Insanity

Wednesday, October 13th, 2004

Slashdot is reporting on a new Microsoft patent that covers client-side data processing using drop-down menus, alphanumerical input boxes, check boxes, radio buttons, sliders, arrays, stacks, queues, linked lists, and decision trees. That's right boys and girls - no more sortable DHTML tables, or any kind of fancy DHTML manipulations ...

Sun, Patents and Open Source

Saturday, October 2nd, 2004

Coming on the heels of GrokLaw article describing Sun's new stance fighting against towards open source software, is a strange CNET story about a "new patent" filed for by Sun: Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz, who speaks often of innovation in sales methods and not just technology, is seeking a patent ...

Analysis of Sender-ID patents

Saturday, September 18th, 2004

My former co-chair as the ASRG, John Levine, published an analysis of Sender-ID�s patent application. Along with other opinions offered in the MARID WG, it seems that the patent may very well cover SPF Classis which only does MAIL FROM checking. Considering that Paul Vixie�s and David Green�s drafts predate ...

Microsoft Publishes Patent Applications for Sender-ID

Wednesday, September 15th, 2004

According to a recent post on the MARID list, Microsoft is publishing their patent applications for Sender-ID instead of keeping them private. The actual applications haven�t posted to the USPTO�s site but I am sure people will be watching. If the patent application is publically available, that would allow the ...

The Rumors of Sender-ID’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Monday, September 13th, 2004

While several news stories are reporting that Sender-ID has been killed, that is not entirely true. While Sender-ID in its current form is dead because of PRA, the compromise version with MAILFROM and PRA scopes is not. Also, the co-chairs want to stay away from any other alternative algorithms that ...

PRA Alone is Encumbered

Tuesday, September 7th, 2004

As suspected before, Microsoft's Harry Katz confirmed today that Microsoft's IPR claims apply to their PRA algorithm alone. The rest of Sender-ID is unencumbered unless used in conjunction with PRA.

If you tab through webpages … Pay Up!

Tuesday, September 7th, 2004

According to Slashdot story and the Register Microsoft has been granted a patent for the use of a keyboard TAB key to navigate through a web page. No word yet on the licensing fees for the makers and end-users of those "other" browsers like Mozilla, Opera, etc. And of course Mosaic ...

Sender-ID - A Tale of Open Standards and Corporate Greed? - Part II

Tuesday, August 31st, 2004

Copyright � 2004 Yakov Shafranovich (asrg@shaftek.org). This article is under a different copyright than the rest of this blog. This article was originally published at CircleID. Part II While everything seemed fine and various participants in these discussions were celebrating the merger of these proposals into one, as well as the support ...